A lawyer said that a Chinese court issued a four-year prison sentence today, Monday, on his client, who works in the field of citizen journalism for volunteering to transmit news from the city center of Wuhan during the height of the Corona pandemic that began there last year.
He added that the judgment on his client was issued on the basis of “sparking quarrels and provoking problems.”
Zhang Chan, 37, who was the first to be tried in this context, was among a small group of individuals who reported their accounts of the events in Wuhan after seeing the overcrowded hospitals and empty streets, which painted a more deteriorating picture of the conditions in the epicenter of the pandemic than what was reported by official accounts.
“Most likely, we will appeal the ruling,” her lawyer told Reuters.
“Ms. Zhang believes she is being prosecuted for exercising freedom of expression,” he said before the hearing.
Other citizen journalists in China disappeared without explanation.
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